The moment I read the Prologue of Felicia Sullivan’s The Sky Isn’t Visible From Here I was hooked almost with a voyeuristic, perverse curiosity and a gut-wrenching ache and suspense. My mind and heart raced as the pages turned. What would happen next? How would she survive it? Where would she find the strength to persevere from her mother?

After I finished Part One, in tears, instinctively I wanted to call my mom and thank her for being there for me, being a good mother and providing a healthy environment in which to live an innocent and uneventful childhood. Of course, I also remember the times when I thought I was going through emotional abuse by my upbringing with Peruvian immigrant parents who didn’t understand American culture and tried to enforce on me their old fashioned Latin ways as I grew up in the 80s.

One story I directly related with were her moments described in the chapter “Black Magic” in which she opens it by saying her mother claimed to have practiced black magic. She would inflict a suffering in those she deemed deserved it with the utmost discretion of incantations and spells. Funnily enough, my father too made claim that he had “poder de brujo” (the power of witchcraft) and he made the exact statement as Sullivan remembers from her mother “You don’t know what I can do.”

The chapter continues with Sullivan remembering begging for permission to go to my first sleep over. I too had this same experience precisely in the sixth grade and was met with the same obstacles I don’t know this girl? Who are her parents? Reluctantly too, my mother gave in and allowed me go, only to later regret it severely.

I’m from the mid-west and had I guess a “normal” upbringing in an all-white suburb of Chicago. Our family seemed to be the only “Hispanics in the neighborhood and we did everything in our power to blend in and luckily the color of our skin was not to revealing. “We are of European decent,” my mother and father would always emphasize. You see I to, as Sullivan would not have “fit in” in a Latino neighborhood as I have dark, thick, curly hair, light olive toned skin and I speak Spanish with a funny American accent. Yet other than a few frustrations and extremely minor teenage rebellion in the form of arguments with my parents over cultural differences the similarities with Sullivan end there.

The events of her life that Ms. Sullivan recounts in the Midwest, in my hometown, you only hear about. You hear it about it happening in the inner city, sort of vaguely, maybe on the news in a sensationalized way. You see it in the movies or television programs, well maybe more current television programs, not the ones airing when I grew up. But you really don’t know what its like. You really can’t picture kids surviving these events, especially with the breakthrough of achievements as with Sullivan. You hear of them dying from it or just not making it out, such as her childhood friend, Violet, as described in the chapter “Where The Boys Go.”

Sullivan writes with such heart-breaking honesty and raw detail you could vividly picture her “scenes from a life” playing out like a movie. The poignant details of cultural events and styles, colors, smells, tastes and textures that she uses to describes her pain, fear, anger, happiness and that sometimes empty void induces her reader to live through these moments of her journey. Moments which admittedly even she is not sure of their accuracy, as when she says that her “mother had a way with altering memory constantly altering my history to a point where I never knew what was real or what was her invention.”

Sullivan’s memoir darts back and forth in time over a twenty five-year period in which she recalls through memories and dreams her violent, volatile and abusive childhood and the deterioration of the relationship with her mother. Her mother was a beautiful, tough, selfish, emotionally manipulative, deceitful, domineering woman who became addicted to alcohol, cocaine and abusive men, and yet who despite all these flaws loved her daughter. Her mother in her own ways at times protected her. Felicia recounts her mother’s abusive upbringing which seemed to have hardened her to be a tough, street savvy fighter, but at the same time set her up to fall prey to weaknesses of her socio-economic status such as drugs, alcohol, attachment to unsavory & abusive men and a dishonest life of corruption. History repeating itself, her mother dragged her through all this.

Later, as she grew older, Sullivan in survival mode creates a different persona for herself and a fantasy family in which she was raised, one which others can understand in her new life. One could almost predict that a child growing up in this sort of environment would have to endure what Sullivan went through in order for her to begin to put this tumultuous and painful past behind her. Her becoming addicted to cocaine and alcohol and living a life of deceit and thievery, seems inevitable. Yet amazingly, this girl finds strength in many of those moments to excel at school, at work, at life even despite that she goes home to all this pain and corruption. But soon this escapist method proves too difficult to live up to and she succumbs to similar demons. It is only then that Sullivan finds her way. She finds her a way to push past her painfully detailed memories, past the dreams and realities of her mother, to begin to find herself and move forward.

What I liked best in this story were the tender moments that Ms. Sullivan seems to remember about her times with her mother. However, short they may have been, however long ago they were and however tainted those memories may have become she remembers and describes them. Her mother loved her and she loved her mother and as their audience in these scenes played out with such vivid description you want to root for them. Just as Ms. Sullivan made it out of this life, you hope and root for her mother to find her way and for them to perhaps reconcile. You hope her mother can someday become this figure of support and tranquility in Sullivan’s life, despite all the flaws, as she was in the chapter “Before Cocaine 1984.” Alas, this hope from a girl who grew up with “normal” childhood.

I highly recommend this book to all. It can be purchased online here for $16.29.

For more on the author visit her site here or keep an eye out on LA.CityZine for an interview with her next week.

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